I can think of two options
- You can use non visible control characters such as \r,\n,\t, .... as left or right boundary conditions.
So your example would be as follows:
web_reg_save_param("free_list","LB=<PRE>Number of connections in free list: ","RB=\n", LAST);
Or, if the number of connections is always 2 characters, you could also try using SaveLen, the following example would save the next two characters after the requested string.
web_reg_save_param("free_list","LB=<PRE>Number of connections in free list: ","RB=","SaveLen=2", LAST);
HTH,
./Darren